Health Care and Society – Part 3

Will increased government involvement in the healthcare industry cause more or less corporate lobbying? Both mandated-private and single-payer, nonprofit insurance proposals will likely increase wasteful lobbying. read more.

It’s a near-universal assumption of the healthcare debate that the current system is a market system and it is broken, and hence we should try a government system. The people who assume this aren’t considering the last 100 years of healthcare policy. Government is deeply involved at all levels, from medical licensure and
patents, to direct subsidies and provision, to employee mandates and insurance-pooling controls, at all levels.

It’s been a steady path to medical serfdom all the way, under both parties, and this is precisely what accounts for most of the problems that people complain about. Meanwhile, the private dimensions of the healthcare system is what accounts for its merits.

So what are we doing? The very opposite of what we should be doing: more control instead of more freedom, more spending instead of less, more mandates instead of fewer. The logic of interventionism is taking over:
problems are being addressed by more of what caused the problems. The sick patient is being given more poison with the claim that it is the cure.

We’ve put together this healthcare reader as a means of providing a deeper understanding of cause and effect. This market is like all other sectors of society: it functions best under conditions of freedom rather than state control.